The way in which our democracy dealt with Islam and Muslim immigrants course after 9/11 is of course rather hypocrite and silly. How many words have not been spoken in various European media (especially in North and Central Europe) about the essential danger of Islam? The entire Muslim part of the population was being generalized and criminalized, and this is a community that rarely had a leader who could retort.

“I am not sure that this means that, five years from now, the Islamic Republic will have been “erased from the face of time,” but I expect that this system will no longer persist as it is currently configured. That won’t be the result of any definitive outside intervention, I believe, but from the mismanagement and misjudgment of Iran’s own hardline leadership.”

It is ironic that institutions like the Vali-ye Faqih, the Sepah, and Basij may be the main obstacles to democratic popular will, but at the same time they are like a glue that hold together a true nest of stinging bees. The fact that these ruling institutions no longer rely on negotiation or compromise with public opinion but only on brute force is a very dangerous sign. Obstinacy, inflexibility, and resorting to brute violence may signal the end of politics and of the possibility of negotiation.

What measures and strategies are there for the Green Movement to bring to fruition the hopes that this movement has created in the hearts of those who love freedom? On the occasion of the anniversary of the demonstration of millions of people of Iran to reclaim their citizenship and civil rights, TehranReview interviews Iranian theorists and scholars. In the third episode of this series of interviews, we spoke with Mehdi Jami.

What were the positive and negative aspects in the American president’s recent Middle East speech? President Obama’s recent Middle East speech merits serious investigation for one particularly ironic reason, namely, that it went almost unnoticed in the Middle East and that you could not but observe that it proved to be a nonevent.

For some time now, Bahrain has been witness to the uprising of the people of this country against the Al Khalifa dynasty and the violent crackdown on this movement. What is interesting here is the level of intervention by Iran in Bahrain. This interference reached a point that Hossein Shariatmadari, the license holder of Kayhan newspaper and close ally of the Supreme Leader in Iran, asked for the direct military intervention of Iran in Bahrain.

“The way I used the term does not refer to criticism of American or European policies, or even cultures. ‘Occidentalism’ is a violent fantasy that imagines the West to be so wicked that it must be destroyed. This is a symbolic West, of course, a demonic image associated with sin, greed, corruption, sexual depravity, etcetera. It is a form of dehumanization, because it holds that Westerners have no souls, just base appetites.”

“I think the onus for self-criticism is mostly for those outside of the country who spent much of the fall and winter of 1388 (especially around Ashura) presenting a triumphalist message that the Greens were going to out-maneuver the state. Not only did these pundits over-estimate the organizational breadth and coherence of the Green Movement, but they downplayed the agency of the regime.”

These days, I can truthfully use the word ‘stress’ to describe my state of mind. Let me inhale deeply, then breathe out calmly and tell you why: I am stressed about the 25th of Bahman, the day on which a protest march will be held in Tehran in solidarity with the people of Egypt.

If there is one sensible comparison that can be made, it is between the protesters in Egypt today and the Iranian Green Movement of 2009 – in their democratic motives, peaceful procedure and inventive use of social media.

What is a revolution about? What caused the Tunisian revolution? Why is this spirit contagious? Why is it instilling fear in the hearts of the dictators in the region? Do we (the non-Tunisians, non-Egyptians) have a duty to care about what’s happening in those countries?

The main goal of the absurd accusations of the Iranian regime is to stop Iranians in Europe from getting involved in the democratization of their country.

As we are only a couple of days past the previous decade, let us look at the political currents which shaped its politics, and which, if looked into properly, could tell us a thing or two about what is up with us in the decade(s) to come.

What Wikileaks is doing compensates to an unprecedented degree (in terms of injecting political transparency into the system) for the lameness of the mass media, but the mass media coverage of the release is bringing much of the opacity right back into that transparency, muddling the picture yet again by cherry-picking and focusing only on those documents that fit their narrative about Iran and the Middle East.

We should not forget that this is not the whole tragic picture; this collection of leaked classified documents are just a snapshot of the reality on the ground in Iraq: we don’t have the American military’s top classified documents, the CIA documents, the military contractors’ files, the NATO’s documents, the European intelligence services’ documents, etc. The picture, in a word, could be tremendously grimmer than this.

The very fact that there have been so few voices raised in opposition (and even those voices are nowhere near consistent) to the incessant discrimination against the Roma in Europe is yet another proof to the sad fact that Europe is experiencing yet once more a strong tide of xenophobia.

Peace and welfare can only be protected and defended by those who have already shown a commitment to it. Ahmadinejad only seeks to create war, tension and provocation.

Will there be a military attack? There’s simply no one who can answer this question definitively. My hunch is ‘no’. But again, that’s only a guess. Not always reason reigns in politics. There were so many such reasons against the invasion of Iraq and it did come to happen.

It is very safe to assume that the fifty thousand remaining troops in Iraq under Operation New Dawn are as much about a new dawn in Iraq as the previous Operation Iraqi Freedom was about the freedom of Iraq. The name has changed, but the strategy remains the same.

If the US truly stands for freedom in the world, Obama’s critics say, then the President should surely have made his outrage clear. Perhaps he should have. But what would that have achieved, besides making Americans feel more righteous? The US government, with all its military might, has no authority in Iran, and can do little to influence the politics there.